Alexei Lossan, RBTHHistory professor Oleg Budnitsky speaks with RBTH about the economic assistance the U.S. gave the USSR in WWII.

RBTH: How great was the economic importance of military cooperation between the USSR and the U.S.? What is the importance of Lend-Lease for the formation of economic relations between our countries?

Oleg Budnitsky: It was large-scale military technical assistance from the Allies, especially the U.S., but also the UK and Canada. Volumes of this support are assessed differently. In the Soviet tradition, it was assumed that it was 4 percent of the total production capacity of the USSR, but the latest research shows that in reality the level was as high as 7 percent. The importance of economic cooperation with the U.S., UK and Canada cannot be overestimated. According to the dollar rate of 2003, the inflation-adjusted value of these supplies amounted to $130 billion. These supplies were critical in some key areas. For example, in the beginning of 1942, Western tanks fully replenished Soviet losses, and exceeded them by three times. About 15 percent of the aircraft used by Soviet air forces were supplied by Allies, including the Airacobra fighter and Boston bomber. The Allies supplied 15,000 state-of-the-art machines at that time; for example, famous Soviet ace Alexander Pokryshkin flew Airacobra, as did the rest of his squadron. He shot down 59 enemy aircraft, and 48 of them were thanks to American military equipment.

RBTH: If we speak not only about the supply of military equipment, but also industrial appliances and accessories, what was the volume of cooperation here?

O.B.: One of the main areas of cooperation was aviation fuel. The USSR could not produce gasoline with high octane. However, it was this fuel that was used by the equipment supplied by the Allies. In addition, the Achilles heel of the Soviet Army was communication and transport. The Soviet industry simply could not meet the demand either in number or in quality.

For example, the army lost 58 percent of its vehicles in 1941 alone. To recover these losses, the Allies supplied more than 400,000 vehicles, mainly trucks, to the USSR. During the occupation, the German concern Daimler Benz set up a vehicle assembly line at a factory in Minsk (now the capital of Belarus). After the liberation of the city, the assembly of American vehicles under Lend-Lease was organized there.

It was not only supplies of finished products, but also raw materials that were extremely important – metals, chemicals and products, which were either not produced in the USSR or lost to the enemy. For example, more than half of Soviet aircraft were produced using aluminum supplied by the Allies.

RBTH: What portion of these supplies served military needs directly, and can we talk about a fully-fledged civil partnership?

O.B.: In the first protocol of Lend-Lease (there were four of them), only 20 percent of deliveries were in military equipment, while 80 percent were related to industrial and food production. The Allies supplied 1900 locomotives to the USSR, while only 446 locomotives were produced in the country itself during the same period, as well as 11,000 carriages, while only a few more than 1,000 were made in the USSR. It is impossible to imagine how the Soviet economy would have functioned without these supplies. For example, the telephone cable provided by the Allies could wrap the Earth at the equator. The Allies’ aid was also critical in the reconstruction of production in the liberated regions of the country, including the role of seeds for the resumption of agriculture. Specific products were also supplied; the Allies delivered 610,000 tons of sugar to the USSR, whereas the USSR itself produced little more than 1.46 million tons.

RBTH: How serious was the decline in cooperation after the war?

O.B.: The fall was quite sharp, in the first place because Lend-Lease had ended. The equipment destroyed during the fighting was written off, but what was left was to be returned. Before ending the war, the USSR and the U.S. were negotiating loans for the restoration of the national economy. In particular, the U.S. offered to the Soviet leadership a large-scale loan for 35 years at 2 percent per annum. There were counter-pleas from the Soviet government, specifically Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov tried to negotiate a loan for $6 billion for 30 years, but economic ties failed to develop. The USSR was afraid to get into economic dependence on the West, since the Soviet leadership did not believe in the sincerity of help from the Allies.

Oleg Budnitsky is Director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics.

--------------------

From Imperium Europa: The Book that Changed the World:

Chp 8: The Threat of Globalization

Apex of Capitalism and Communism

Two senseless World Wars: instigated, manipulated, and perpetrated by the same international-manipulators, left the Europid bled white. The emerging victorious ideologies were Liberal-Capitalism and Bolshevism, two sides of the same coin. For Liberalism, parliamentary-democracy, socialism, communism and the modern tyranny of plutocratic capitalism - ostensible enemies, have the same matrix, the same goals: anti-Hierarchy, anti-Spiritual.

For today, Communism and Financial Capitalism meet at their highest point. The apex of Communism today, is nothing else than the multinationals. Huge conglomerates, with a multiracial, unseen, board of directors, more often than not manipulated by one or two of the usual tribe, operating from some unreachable, hidden headquarters. And below them, far, far below them, millions of shareholders, blind as to the operations, the machinations, the goals of their all-powerful, mysterious Moloch. The quarterly document denoting the dividend keeps the millions of minions contented and quiescent. Today’s multinationals are nothing else but the meeting point, the convergence, the apex of both Communism and Capitalism!

--------------------

Finance Capitalism and Communism - both Jewish.When Communism collapsed under its own weight, the Jews simply abandoned it.The conquest of the world could now proceed under Capitalism - lethal.

After two years of exploratory visits and friendly negotiations, Ford Motor Company signs a landmark agreement to produce cars in the Soviet Union on this day in 1929.

The Soviet Union, which in 1928 had only 20,000 cars and a single truck factory, was eager to join the ranks of automotive production, and Ford, with its focus on engineering and manufacturing methods, was a natural choice to help. The always independent-minded Henry Ford was strongly in favor of his free-market company doing business with Communist countries. An article published in May 1929 in The New York Times quoted Ford as saying that “No matter where industry prospers, whether in India or China, or Russia, all the world is bound to catch some good from it.”

Signed in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 31, 1929, the contract stipulated that Ford would oversee construction of a production plant at Nizhni Novgorod, located on the banks of the Volga River, to manufacture Model A cars. An assembly plant would also start operating immediately within Moscow city limits. In return, the USSR agreed to buy 72,000 unassembled Ford cars and trucks and all spare parts to be required over the following nine years, a total of some $30 million worth of Ford products. Valery U. Meshlauk, vice chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, signed the Dearborn agreement on behalf of the Soviets. To comply with its side of the deal, Ford sent engineers and executives to the Soviet Union.

At the time the U.S. government did not formally recognize the USSR in diplomatic negotiations, so the Ford agreement was groundbreaking. (A week after the deal was announced the Soviet Union would announce deals with 15 other foreign companies, including E.I. Du Pont de Nemours and RCA.) As Douglas Brinkley writes in “Wheels for the World,” his book on Henry Ford and Ford Motor, the automaker was firm in his belief that introducing capitalism was the best way to undermine communism. In any case, Ford’s assistance in establishing motor vehicle production facilities in the USSR would greatly impact the course of world events, as the ability to produce these vehicles helped the Soviets defeat Germany on the Eastern Front during World War II. In 1944, according to Brinkley, Stalin wrote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling Henry Ford “one of the world’s greatest industrialists” and expressing the hope that “may God preserve him.”

-----------------

See previous post.

Financial Capitalism and Communism: both Jewish. Two sides of the same coin. Capitalism backed Communist, Jewish Russia against Germany - as today, Jews will always back Muslims against Whites.

Gottfried Feder, Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money (1919)

----------

Gottfried Feder was a genius, a self thought Man who was among the first to identify the Source of Power of the Jews. Creating money out of nothing and increasing the supply through interest. Creating wars in order to finance both sides out of this created money - while impoverishing the People and killing the White Race.